When a user is using the Internet, the content data from networks frequently need to be presented for the user. For example, a user may need to play a video, audio or flasher (Flash) and the like.
For the currently available Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 5 standards, in order to solve the problem of failure in video playing resulting from the issue that different browsers have different supporting capacities for various video formats, a <source> tag has been added to the <video> tag, which allows to designate a plurality of video sources. In this way, a browser is allowed to selected one of the video source to play the video based on its own supporting capacity. It is shown as follows:
<video controls> <source src=”video1.mp4”/> <source src=”video1.ogv”/> <source src=”video1.webm”/></video>
However, the current mainstream browsers, during execution, always choose the video source referred to by the first <source> tag to play the video as default, without considering the supporting capacity of the specific player of the terminal (such as a smartphone or computer) system to different video formats.
On the other hand, web developers do not consider how to handle the situation when a terminal is unable to play a video.
Due to the fact that there are many different systems for the terminals (such as a smartphone or computer), in practice, a user may frequently encounter the situation that the format of the first video source is not supported by the player of a terminal system, which will result in a failure in playing, and accordingly, a poor user experience.
For audio, Flash and other type of content data, the same problem does exist as well.
The foregoing concerns the supporting capacity of a browser to content data.
On the other hand, in the case when a number of different content data sources are located on different websites, it is possible that the content data source ranking in the front may correspond to a relatively slow network access speed.
Alternatively, in the case when a number of different content data sources have different byte counts, it is possible that the first content data source may represent a relatively large data flow.
In the situations mentioned above, according to the conventional method, it may simply use the first content source to present the content data, though it may not be the best way of presenting the content data.
It is therefore desirable to have a method or device that is able to select a suitable content data source among a plurality of different content data sources.